A Neat Little Primer on the History of Mobile Viruses

March 29, 2013

A Neat Little Primer on the History of Mobile Viruses

A three-part blog series from antivirus software maker Norton details the surprisingly long history of mobile malware.

Mobile Security, a mobile seucrity news site maintained by Symantec’s Norton antivirus business, has published an interesting three-part blog series on the origins and rise of mobile malware–an issue that’s increasingly important as more and more of us snatch up smartphones and tablets.

There are a number of neat tidbits mentioned in the posts, such as the fact that mobile malware first emerged nearly nine years ago, in June 2004, when security researchers received copies of Cabir, a mobile worm written in C++ that targeted the Symbian operating system. Cabir spread via Bluetooth, adding a file to the phone, and was actually quite benign: when you turned on the phone, it showed the word “Caribe” on the screen. Cabir wasn’t released to infect consumers’ phones, but it was used by hackers to build other viruses that emerged shortly thereafter.

If you’d like to check out all three posts, you can find them here, here, and here.